Climate Science Legal Defense Fund: Support Michael Mann

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund is working to make CSLDF a one-stop resource for scientists looking for legal resources and is currently pursuing several educational and legal initiatives. At this time, CSLDF needs financial support to help Dr. Michael Mann.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund continues to receive donations and offers of help from various stakeholders. We are actively working with several organizations in order to make CSLDF a one-stop resource for scientists looking for legal resources and we are currently pursuing several educational and legal initiatives which will be made public in the future.

1. Fend-off the American Tradition Institute’s demand to take Dr. Mann’s deposition, which is a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate him for exercising his constitutional rights by petitioning to intervene in the case.

2. Defeat ATI’s attempt to obtain Dr. Mann’s email correspondence through the civil discovery process, which essentially is an “end-run” around the scholarly research exemption under the Virginia FOIA law.

3. Prepare for summary judgment on the issue of the exempt status of his email correspondence under the Virginia FOIA law.

And, if you believe government employees have no expectation of privacy in their work emails, and the government is required to disclose those for which there is no exemption (there is none for academic freedom), then you can go to the ATI website and donate to ensure professors realize they, like all the rest of us who have served in the government, have a duty to follow the law, including FOIA. see http://www.ATInstitute.org

Here's an example of how those who have been filing those FOI demands operate.

A whole bunch of FOI requests for the CRU's raw temperature data were filed a couple of years ago. Skeptics were demanding all of the CRU's raw temperature data and were quick to accuse the CRU of hiding data/stonewalling/etc.

Well last summer, the CRU finally did release all of the raw temperature data in its possession (including proprietary data that the CRU had obtained after signing nondisclosure agreements).

Now, you'd think that the skeptics who were so eager to get their hands on that raw data-set that they filed all those FOI requests would have jumped right on it and conducted their own independent analyses of the CRU data. But you would be wrong. Not a single skeptic has come out with any independent analysis results in the 7+ months since the data-set they wanted was released. Why is that?

It's not like double-checking the CRU's global-temperature results is all that difficult. A competent analyst could do it in a few days (at most). I could walk college freshmen through the procedure -- it's really not that difficult at all. Run the raw data through a straightforward anomaly-averaging procedure (well documented on numerous web-sites) and you get pretty much the same results that the CRU has published.

So why is it that the skeptics who were filing all those FOI requests have been unwilling/unable to perform the few *days* of work need to accomplish this in the 7+ *months* since the data-set they were demanding was released?